I will share with you my travels through the wedding planning process while I do my best to stay within a $3,000 budget (excluding our wardrobe and rings).
Hopefully I can help, in some way, other brides who are also on a strict budget during this dreadful economy.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

My DIY Kid's Booklet

I decided to make just a small kid's booklet for the children that will be at my reception. If all that were invited come, there will be a total of twelve. I started by scouring the internet for templates of coloring and activity pages (wedding related). So I Googled "kids wedding activity book" under images. So I copy and pasted 4 coloring pages and 3 activity pages. On my own, I also created a word scramble with the theme of things you might find at our sweets table, along with another 2 pages of "how many four letter words and higher can you make from the words "PETER AND BELINDA". I put 2 pages per sheet to be printed out, then used my handy dandy cutter to trim them down to the size I needed. (4 x 8)The picture above is a bit blurry.....but you get the idea.I then stapled the 10 pages together.Next, I got the photo cards from SeeHere.com I had made last year......there was a freebie special going on at the time, and I was thinking ahead. lol This is to be our cover for the booklets.In fact....if you're interested in getting 25 free photo cards from them, they are running a special right now, and all you have to do is pay for shipping. You get (25) 4" x 8" cards in whatever design you choose, to be used for whatever you would like. Just enter this coupon code at checkout: cards-36. This special ends on 7/17/10.So anyways.....I hot glue gunned the cover to the stack of papers by putting a thin line along the top.................and there you have it! A little time consuming, but it basically cost me nothing but time. (Last year they even paid for shipping on photo cards!) =p

On another subject........... I sent my invites out in 2 batches......one batch on Thursday and one batch on Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't take pics of my assembly process as I was in SUCH a big hurry to get them out. As I may have mentioned in another post, I've been so busy with Etsy, that time just flew right by me. I wanted to get them out really early so that when the response deadline came up, I could call the people I hadn't heard from to get the count. Then, send out more invites for any open spaces I might have. You see, because of budget AND reception space we had to cut our guest list WAY down low, so I figured whoever couldn't make it on our first wave of invites, maybe people from a second wave could. Make sense? Well anyways....I'll try and take pictures and share from my second wave. How's that?Did you or do you plan to do anything similar?

5 comments:

Great idea about the kids’ activity book! We created a word puzzle for all of our guests, and it was a big hit. With the invites, I think it’s better to send out the second wave invites as you get “no” responses during the regular RSVP timeframe. If you send out another wave after the original deadline, those guests will know they were in the “second tier.”

This kids' booklet is so fabulous! We just found this site that offered a little placemat with puzzles, a word search, maze, picture to color and a scavenger hunt at the reception. It had our names on it too and was in red (our wedding color). I loved the idea! Unfortunately, I didn't think to get pictures of it and neither did our photographer :(

I am so glad you have shots of these...be sure to specifically ask your photographer to try to get shots of kids writing in them on the big day!

And yes, we had an A list and B list for our guest invites...as the no responses rolled in from the A listers, we bumped up B listers and mailed out their invites. Of course, we gave them a later reply by date since their invites went out a little later. But it worked perfectly and no one knew :)